My wife is a huge fan of lists, it's how she gets so much done, both herself and through me. She will make herself lists, and she will leave me lists, as all good wives do. And as all good husbands do, I forget about the list until my last moment, from my estimate of the list, then I do everything in a rush so that when she returns I have both finished the list and look suitably knackered that I hope she might leave me a smaller list next time. And of course it never works. You see my wife is incredibly pro-active, all the time, especially through me, whereas I prefer short bursts, rather than a constant steady pace. However, recently I have realised that when it comes to my walk with God I would really like to become more pro-active, and have been thinking about the practicalities of that.
One such area comes back to lists. I don't know about you, but quite often when I pray after a quiet time, I realise I have very successfully written a To Do list for God, yet all I expect of myself is to mull over what I have thought about in the week. No wonder I find I never seem to get anything done for God! I'm a man, I need my lists, but the grace of God is such that he doesn't leave a list that will be inspected on our next meeting, he simply shows more of himself to us that we might want to be more like him.
While I never admit this to my wife, it would be far too dangerous, sometimes being held accountable to a list of jobs is very helpful, our previous house would have never been done up without them. So I am currently trying something, but before I finish my times with God and kindly hand him my list of requests in prayer, I am trying to write a list of things I feel he is prompting me to step out in. I expect him to be far better at getting through his list than mine, but maybe I will start to look back, similar to a prayer diary, and see the results of being a pro-active Christian!
Tim Holt
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